


Odile

by passeridae



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Melancholy, Widowmaker Rediscovers Ballet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 10:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17765147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passeridae/pseuds/passeridae
Summary: She stands at the barre which encircles the room, trying not to stare too hard at her reflection in the mirror. Purples and blues, nothing like the flashes of pale skin she remembers. Running her hands along the smoothed wood she feels a tightness in her chest that she cannot describe. It aches. She swallows the feeling down, takes a deep breath and sets her hands on the bar, relaxes her shoulders. Her feet know where to go from there.





	Odile

Widowmaker wakes up one morning to a dress hanging on the back of her door; layers of tulle, light as air, with a boned bodice in soft satin. It sparkles in the weak light, gems at the neck and waist catching the light. After a pause, she puts it on. It fits perfectly, swaying around her knees as she dances half remembered steps from one side of her room to the other.

The next time she's told to attend a formal event for Talon, she wears it. If her steps are a little more lyrical than usual, her toes turned out just a bit, nobody but her and her patron notices.

A few weeks later, a stretchy undersuit, knitted legwarmers, and a soft chiffon skirt appear in her quarters. She looks at them in confusion, and leaves them be. the week after that, they're joined by a pair of rigid pink shoes, some elastic, a spool of ribbon, a needle and thread. She runs her hand, reverently, down the hard satin. The smell of hardwood floors, a quiet laugh, the burn of her thigh muscles as she turned. A memory just out of grasp.

That evening, she finds herself sitting on the floor, one leg stretched out, the other close to her chest, making the shoes as they should be. As she unspools the ribbon, a note falls out. It's a room number in the base, and the door code. The room smells like home

* * *

She stands at the barre which encircles the room, trying not to stare too hard at her reflection in the mirror. Purples and blues, nothing like the flashes of pale skin she remembers. Running her hands along the smoothed wood she feels a tightness in her chest that she cannot describe. It aches. She swallows the feeling down, takes a deep breath and sets her hands on the bar, relaxes her shoulders. Her feet know where to go from there.

From foot positionings, she moves through on muscle memory to plies, jumps, an entire routing seared into her body even though her mind remembers none of it. Her legs and core burn, her breath comes in sharp pants. She feels almost as alive as in the moment of a kill.

Eventually she comes to the end of the routine. Standing in the middle of the floor, the silence around her rings sharp as a bell. She hadn’t even noticed that she had been humming until she stopped. Her feet are bleeding through the shoes. She can barely feel it over the beating of her heart.

* * *

Her callouses are gone after so much time out of the shoes, so after her first practice she has blisters running over her toes and across her heels. There is a flash of remembered joy, a flicker of pleased achievement, when she looks at them. One of her toes is bleeding, and this makes her smile as well. The process of tending her feet is automatic, a muscle memory rather than something conscious.

She leaves a note for her patron "please bring numbing cream, and a second pair of shoes if possible". There is a month of no new arrivals, and her hope slowly sinks, then one morning there are not one but three new pairs of shoes on her dresser, along with a wrap to warm her shoulders, a little med kit, and the handwritten explanation "shoes were hard to get". After that, there is a slow trickle of pastel bodysuits, light skirts with delicate lace on the hems, and finely knitted boleros that feel soft as water to the touch. She suspects that none of them are commercial.

It becomes a reprieve, something other than the slow movements to lining up a shot. She practices more after missions, uses the physicality to soften the stillness that otherwise settles over her. The beat of her heart, the burn in her muscles, these are things that she only experiences here. She favours lighter colours; blush pinks, baby blues, and soft textures. No armour, no metal, just the rhythm of her feet on the ground and the music in her head.

* * *

It isn't until she catches Reaper in the act that she is completely sure that it is him. Her night had been sleepless; too much viscera, blood tacky on her palms, so she had been awake when he had ghosted in to deposit his latest creation.

"Why do you do this?" she asks, unmoving in her bed. Reaper turns, light catching across the planes of his mask. He sighs, heavy. "Everyone should have something for themselves." With that cryptic remark, he dissolves again and slips away. 

Something for themselves, she ponders as she lies awake. She thinks of bloody feet, of the echoes of laughter and the smell of wood. Of standing at a barre and moving through a series of motions with a foreign grace, soft, curving, nothing like anything else she knows. The burn of muscle, the ache of her feet — pain of her own choosing. Her own.


End file.
